Unexpected blessings abound in The Nun II, an inevitable sequel to The Nun, the 2018 Conjuring-inspired horror film many saw and few loved. Fans watching the original again this week as prep (scary movie devotees do their homework), will note that it had a nifty bit of business involving bells, which signaled a living being inside a buried casket. Otherwise, it was heavy on howling demon CGI effects and a super-dull portal-to-hell backstory.Â
We might have expected more of the same for the sequel, but instead, incoming director Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) and a trio of writers new to the series, have fashioned a story that gives the expanded cast (including some gifted child actors) an increasingly amped-up series of run-for-your-life action sequences that prove to be quite diverting.Â
The Demon Nun (Bonnie Aarons), as we’re meant to call her, does indeed howl, but sparingly, while her history grounded in dime-store Catholicism, is disposed of quickly. The filmmakers are actually jazzed about their living characters, and it’s clear they’re anxious to get to the third-act appearance of a wonderfully ridiculous horned hellhound, whose scene-stealing presence surely wasn’t approved in advance by the Demon Nun. She, of course, was meant to have been banished back to Hell at the end of the first film by a priest (Demián Bichir), a sister named Irene (Taissa Farmiga) whose a psychic nun still in her novitiate, and a handsome, irresistibly sweet caretaker (Jonas Bloquet), working the haunted Romanian abbey, circa 1952.Â
Four years later, nuns and priests begin to die, gruesomely, including, as The Nun II opens, a priest who burns to death while seeming to float in midair, in a church in western France. The Vatican summons Sister Irene to investigate, a journey she’ll undertake with a younger nun, Sister Debra (Storm Reid). Together, they become a Holmsian pair of sleuths, with Debra, wonderfully played by Reid, bringing a welcome sense of…
Read the full article here
